Eleven O'Clock in the Desert

The shooting season was ticking round on the Western Desert last week. The heat was imperceptibly abating, like a fading headache. The nights were getting longer. The winds were cooling and veering northerly to kick up curtains of dust to screen assault.

Both sides were nearly ready.

The British have brought their Middle Eastern strength to a dozen divisions--but less than half of them are properly equipped for offensive action. British materiel is being hurried straight through the Mediterranean. All the while U.S. stuff is trickling in -- Tomahawks, Marylands, Chrysler tanks, ammunition, trucks, spare parts. The British will have to try, sooner or later, to open up Tobruk: two-thirds of all the motor transport they had in North Africa were trapped there in the retreat last April.

The Axis, especially the Italians, have been chocking reinforcements into Libya all summer, as fast as they could get them past the British. That was not very fast. Since Nazi bombers retired to Russia, the British Fleet has had a better time of it. Last week British submarines drove tin fish into a 10,000-ton Italian heavy cruiser; and into a big Italian liner, believed to be the 23,635-ton Duilio and into the 11,398-ton Esperia; planes of the Fleet Air Arm torpedoed and destroyed an Italian destroyer off Tripoli; others bombed merchant ships in Tripoli harbor.

Both sides were obliged to make a try. Suez was the stake. The British, who realized that they had come within an ace of losing the canal in June, before Hitler turned back to Russia, were going to try to revise the scenario from here in. They were busy at the outposts. Iraq and Iran would now at least be buffers. Britain's Middle Eastern Commander in Chief General Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck flew to Cyprus, where he declared himself well satisfied with defenses, particularly air fields, which had been rushed into being to prevent a Crete repeat.

In Alexandria, the focus of British preparations, there was an air of bustle, part generated by fear, part by determination -- an atmosphere of abnormality which showed itself, for instance, in the crowds of Egyptians who had taken to riding on the tops of commuting trains, first in their rush to escape bombs, later just because it was cooler there.

The bustle was not meaningless. No matter how long the Russian campaign lasts, the try in North Africa is bound to come soon. The time and the weather are ripening: a year ago this week the Italians considered it time to try.

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